


Moonlight Spotlight

by botgal



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Ballet, Basically Joey shows Xefros the wonders of ballet, Crushes, Cultural Differences, Culture Sharing, Dancing, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pale-Red Vacillation, Quadrant Confusion, Quadrant Vacillation, and Xefros falls a little harder for her in he doesn't even know what way, mutual crushing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 02:27:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12245277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/botgal/pseuds/botgal
Summary: Have you ever danced with an alien in the pink moonlight?Well Xefros hasn't. But he's certainly content to watch her dance.





	Moonlight Spotlight

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all thought I wasn't total trash and had forgotten my first fic where Xefros wasn't sure what quadrant he was feeling for Joey?  
> Well too bad, you were wrong. Here's even more quadrant confused Xefros feeling maybe a little more pale than red for Joey that I wrote up near midnight.

It was only after a long night of riding along on the newly renamed Mononoke that they had finally decided to rest. After Xefros had given the Deercat and his own lusus some water and food to their respective tastes, he joined Joey by the small fire she had made, where she was sitting and warming up byt eh fire after dinner.. She didn't even really know what it was that they had eaten. But it smelled like food and didn't look like a bug, so she had agreed to consuming it. And they had enjoyed themselves.

But now, it was quiet and still dark-ish in the hours before the sun started to rise. And they were both a bit loathe to go into the cave that they had decided on being their shelter for the night. At least, not yet.

“... There's so many stars in the sky,” Joey murmured. Xefros looked up at her, and saw her face pointed skyward. “... Kind of reminds me of my bedroom.”

“Oh. Did you have some sort of skylight in your respite block?” Joey had told him about a bit of the terminology from her planet (kind of sounded like Highblood vernacular she was speaking, but he understood regardless).

“Hm? Oh, no.” Joey shook her head. “It was just my ceiling. But my mom, when she was still around, she painted all of these glow in the dark stars on my bedroom ceiling. So whenever I went to bed I'd see them glowing above me... it was nice.”

“... That sounds really pretty,” Xefros said softly. “It sounds like it was pretty neat of your momlusus to do that.”

“She was a pretty neat lady,” Joey agreed, smiling with just a hint of sadness. Xefros swore he could feel his blood pusher clench a bit. Oh no, there it went again. That hint of pale stirrings. He'd been feeling them more and more the longer they were on this travel of theirs. Always focused around Joey. It seemed like a natural inclination, perhaps, given she was an alien girl on their hostile planet with no way to get home in the foreseeable future that he knew of. But when he was currently pondering the situation with Dammek and their moirallegience, it wasn't something particularly beneficial to have weighing on his mind.

“Yeah, she really was,” Joey sighed. “We had lots of pictures, she was so beautiful and so talented. By the time she was my age she was already a really great dancer and she had already won a trophy for being the best at ballet when she was my age...”

“Ball... et?” Xefros tilted his head and sounded out the word. “What's that?” Joey looked positively gobsmacked.

“You don't know what _ballet_ is?”

“No. Not that I know of, why?” Xefros asked with confusion. “Is it something important?”

“It's _so_ important!” Joey exclaimed, loud enough to startle Xefros. “Ballet is like, one of the most important types of dancing! It's all about being graceful and strong and knowing how to do everything super well while looking super pretty! I mean, not knowing about ballet is like not knowing who _Clarissa_ is!”

“... Um...” Joey's eyes went wide as dinnerplates as she realized who she was talking to, and she smacked her face with her hand.

“Oh my god. Of course. Alien planet. Of course you're not going to know what I'm talking about. I'm so dumb.”

“Uh, I mean, it's okay...” Xefros awkwardly patted Joey twice on the arm, before realizing what he was doing and quickly retracting his hand. He cleared his throat. “So, um... ballet is some sort of dancing, you said? It sounds really nice.”

“Oh... yeah. I mean, it's really beautiful when you know what you're doing. I don't want to brag, but I'm pretty good at it. I've been taking lessons in it in and tap...” She smiled a lot when she got into talking about things she really liked to do, Xefros noticed. It was... nice to see her doing that. Especially since she often seemed unhappy or nervous on their planet (with good reason, he would admit).

“... Would you mind showing me?” Joey looked at him with surprise, and immediately Xefros's face lit up in a dark burgundy blush. “I-I mean, if that's not a thing you would mind doing. And if it's alright and you wanted to...”

“O-oh, well, I don't know,” Joey admitted. She rubbed at the back of her head nervously. No one but her ballet class, Jude, or Roxy had ever really seen her dance. And this was an alien seeing it for the first time. So she'd be doing a sort of first contact thing for ballet. An intergalactic ballet ambassador... Wow that would be a big honor. “I mean, it's usually better if I do it to music...”

“Um, I have some music. Or, I could find some.” Xefros held up his tablet that he had connected to his autotune mic.

“I, um, I see,” Joey said nervously. “Well, I mean, if you can find some good music for it, I'm sure I could give it a try.” Xefros nodded in agreement, and quickly went to work searching for some appropriate music for ballet under Joey's instruction. He mostly had a lot of songs by him and Dammek, and the internet connection was rather spotty all the way out where they were. But, at last, he thought he finally found something, and turned up the speaker on his tablet.

It was a simple, refined tune. Some sort of Highblood dance music he found on the internet. Most Highbloods didn't care about restricting their music from Lowbloods, amongst other things. If anything they thought that Lowbloods taking in their cultured interests would make them a bit less terrible at absolutely everything. Dammek would have probably reamed him for purposefully seeking out such music... but then Dammek wasn't here right now. And wasn't the fact that he was looking for it to fit some alien dance performance plenty subversive to make up for it?

Once it was properly buffered and volume turned up, Xefros gave her a thumbs up. Joey had pulled on her ballet slippers and let out a sigh, looking like she was steeling herself.

“Okay... here goes nothing, I guess.”

She tried to remember the steps best as she could. Following the smooth but stately melody of the music. It was a basic song, but comforting in that regard. Like being back in the ballet studio and taking those first lessons which got her hooked on the art of dance in the first place. Step one two, plié , plié , take the pose, do a twirl. Simple, easy steps. Steps that felt like home even with music she'd never heard before in a place that hardly constituted the polished floors of a studio, but it felt that comfort all the same.

Even if she was being watched, she didn't feel nervous. She didn't forget that Xefros was there, exactly. It was more like... there were no mistakes to make. He didn't know what she was doing, so all she could do was her best. No criticism, she was showing him something entirely new. Like he'd shown her so many new things in his attempts to help her adjust to this new alien planet. No matter how much she wanted to get back home... she appreciated that someone cared enough to try to make her comfortable.

Even with the cultural mix-ups in the past, this was one place that she could shine. Show her culture to him and be happy.

She took one minute to glance at him, in the middle of her improvised dance, and saw him staring at her as if completely dumbfounded. His face filled with color, eyes wide and watching her as if he were transfixed. It was... kind of embarrassing, but it also felt kind of good? Like he was really appreciating what she was trying to do.

But most of all, it gave her a warm feeling. Like he really was liking this. And she felt proud of that. Proud enough she tried for an extra long spin, and felt a note of happiness in her chest when she succeeded.

On his part, Xefros was feeling a bit overwhelmed. Sure, this was all so strange to him. He wasn't used to any of this and he was watching Joey dance about to the music.

She wasn't really pretty by Troll standards. Her skin an off color, a lack of horns, and just a general sense of _alien_ ness about her. Yet, even with all that, with the pink moon shining down on her like a spotlight, it was like it didn't matter. She wasn't Joey the alien. She was just... Joey. And he couldn't take her eyes off of her.

He still wasn't sure how he felt about her. This girl who probably very literally crash landed in his life and made his head spin and his chest thump in ways he didn't understand. Who made him question things from his lot in life to his moirallegiance with the one he'd always thought he was destined to be with.

And yet here he was. Completely entranced watching Joey gracefully twirl and step about the clearing in her pink ballet slippers. Looking for all the world so strange and mystifying that it didn't really matter if she was pretty or not. He was just transfixed by the simple grace and movement of her. Moreso than he'd felt invested in a long, long time since he no longer had time to watch Arena Stickball like he so loved to once upon a time.

He had no idea what this was that he was feeling, something gently pale that made him appreciate her talent, or warmly red that was just so attached to this image of her. But, whatever it was, it was so warm and positive he just wanted to hold onto it in his chest forever.

… He just really hoped that Joey wouldn't notice him blushing.

 


End file.
